By Dan Kennedy • The press, politics, technology, culture and other passions
My What Works partner Ellen Clegg has written a new post on how the Memphis media are dealing with Trump’s troop deployment. She’s got updates from The Commercial Appeal, the Daily Memphian, the Tennessee Lookout, MLK50 and the Institute for Public Service Reporting and the Memphis Flyer.
Nonprofit local news is on the upswing, according to a new report from the Institute for Nonprofit News. An INN survey of nearly 400 digital-first nonprofit news organizations showed that the median outlet raised $532,000 in revenue in 2024, up from $477,000 the previous year. That’s an increase of 11.5%.
In addition, local news organizations now make up 51% of INN’s membership, up from 48% in 2023. The remainder of the projects are regional, statewide and national.
INN is a vitally important organization in the world of local nonprofit news. Through its NewsMatch program, news publishers are able to leverage local donations with matching funds — one-to-one in some cases. The program has raised more than $400 million since 2017. INN’s ethical guidelines have been widely adopted by the nonprofit journalism community. The organization also acts as a fiscal sponsor for fledgling nonprofits that have not yet received IRS approval for full 501(c)(3) recognition.
I was thrilled to attend the Mass Book Awards ceremony at the Statehouse earlier today, when “What Works in Community News: Media Startups, News Deserts, and the Future of the Fourth Estate,” which Ellen Clegg and I wrote about possible ways out of the local journalism crisis, was recognized as one of the top dozen nonfiction books in Massachusetts.
Our book was one of nine that were longlisted. In addition, the top nonfiction award went to “We Refuse: A History of Black Resistance,” by Kellie Carter Jackson, with honors going to “Freeman’s Challenge: The Murder That Shook America’s Original Prison for Profit,” by Robin Bernstein, and “Exit Wounds: How America’s Guns Fuel Violence Across the Border,” by Ieva Jusionyte. The awards are sponsored by the Massachusetts Center for the Book.
Unfortunately, Ellen wasn’t able to make it, but I was honored to attend and be recognized along with the other winners.
It was also great to reconnect with Gayatri Patnaik, the director of Beacon Press, who embraced our vision and helped bring it to fruition. Our immediate editor, Catherine Tung, has since moved on to a senior editing position at Farrar, Straus and Giroux, but she provided crucial support when we lost a year during COVID. She also gave us good advice that we tried to follow in our reporting — to assess how well the local news projects we were writing about were covering arts and culture, a crucial part of civic life. That said, most of them weren’t, with the New Haven Independent and its affiliated low-power radio station, WNHH, standing as notable exceptions.
I’m also proud of the professional partnership Ellen and I have developed as we’ve built out the book into a wider project, What Works: The Future of Local News, based at Northeastern University in the School of Journalism and affiliated with the Center for Transformative Media. What Works comprises a frequently updated website on developments in local news; an every-other-week podcast featuring news entrepreneurs and thought leaders; conferences and webinars; and a database of independent local news organizations in Massachusetts.
For at least 15 years, local-news visionaries have been thinking about ways to build a media organization owned and governed by its staff and members of the community. The idea is to create a news cooperative — that is, a co-op, similar to a food co-op or a credit union. Members might contribute money or labor, and in return they’d have a say in hiring and coverage.
I followed efforts to build such a co-op in Haverhill, Massachusetts, where longtime journalist Tom Stites wanted to test out a concept he called the Banyan Project with a site called Haverhill Matters. Unfortunately, years of anemic fundraising went nowhere, and in January 2020, the local organizers shut it down.
On Friday, Memphis journalist Dan Conaway took to Facebook and leveled a sensational charge on his public feed: that the Daily Memphian, a high-profile nonprofit startup, had censored a column he’d written about Donald Trump’s decision to send National Guard troops to the city.
“I have left the Daily Memphian,” Conaway posted on his public feed. “They refused to run my column this week. Too critical of Trump, they said. Trump is not local, they said. This week, of all weeks, Trump is not local? Enough, I said.”
My What Works colleague, Ellen Clegg, took a deep dive into what had happened — and discovered that the Memphian had actually edited out a racist trope that Conaway inserted into the original version of his column.
On the latest “What Works” podcast, Ellen Clegg and I talk with Tracy Baim, a Chicago-based journalist who directed the recently published LGBTQ+ Media Mapping Project, which tracks LGBTQ news outlets across the country.
The LGBTQ+ Media Mapping Project was created in partnership with the MacArthur Foundation, the Local Media Foundation, News Is Out and the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at CUNY. The project surfaced 107 LGBTQ media outlets in total, 80 of which responded to the survey.
According to the accompanying report: “While they may have few similarities, there are several common denominators: Most are in need of additional resources to better cover their communities, and most are facing strong headwinds as advertising and sponsors reverse course, pulling back from diverse marketing efforts.”
Baim is also the executive director of Press Forward Chicago, the local arm of a national philanthropic effort to address the community news crisis.
I’ve got a Quick Take about the state of Kansas, where authorities have banned print newspapers in prisons, a ban that affects some 9,000 inmates in 20 correctional facilities. Weirdly enough, officials have not banned digital newspapers, although, as media commentator Bo Sacks observes, “Most Kansas inmates have limited or no meaningful internet access.”
Ellen’s Quick Take is on a column in The Minnesota Star Tribune written by Steve Grove, the CEO and publisher. He writes about the “stabilizing power of quality journalism” and announces a new team in the newsroom devoted to investigative reporting. But he also announces the outsourcing of the Strib’s print product, which means job losses.
You can listen to our conversation here, or you can subscribe through your favorite podcast app.
NJ PBS chair Scott Kobler has issued a statement in which he criticizes New Jersey government officials for “intransigence or maybe even apathy” over the public broadcasting funding crisis.
As I noted Wednesday, NJ PBS may shut down in June 2026 following a breakdown in negotiations between the state and WNET of New York, the public media organization that runs the New Jersey operation. In addition to losing some $1.5 million in federal funds, NJ PBS’s allotment of state funds has been cut from $1 million for the coming year to just $250,000.
The cuts are likely to affect NJ Spotlight News, a website covering statewide politics and public policy as well as the name of NJ PBS’s daily half-hour newscast. The two operations merged in 2019. Although WNET has pledged to keep the news operation alive online and on its New York-based station, Thirteen, regardless of what happens, its reporting capacity is likely to be reduced unless a well-heeled benefactor or two steps up.
The MAGA right’s war on public broadcasting has come for an innovative statewide news collaboration in New Jersey, leaving its ultimate fate uncertain.
NJ PBS, the state’s public television outlet, may shut down in June 2026 following massive budget cuts at both the federal and state levels. The Republican Congress, acting at the behest of Donald Trump, eliminated $1.1 billion in funding for public television and radio over the next two years — including about $1.5 million for New Jersey’s TV station, according to Daniel Han of Politico. Meanwhile, the New Jersey state legislature, facing its own pressure from Trump cuts, reduced funding to NJ PBS by $750,000, reports Victoria Gladstone of NJ.com.
The upshot is that WNET of New York, the nonprofit umbrella organization for NJ PBS, was unable to reach an agreement with the New Jersey Public Broadcasting Authority to continue operating the station beyond June 2026. WNET says it will look for a new partner to keep NJ PBS on the air.
For news consumers, the effect could be considerable. NJ PBS is one of a tiny handful of public television stations that offers a daily evening newscast. Since 2019, that newscast has been produced in conjunction with NJ Spotlight News, a 15-year-old digital news outlet covering state politics and public policy. It’s a true collaboration, with the newscast and video clips posted on the website and with Spotlight reporters frequently popping up on the air. The story of how Spotlight and NJ PBS merged is told in “What Works in Community News,” the book that Ellen Clegg and I wrote.
John Mooney, the co-founder and executive director of NJ Spotlight News, declined to comment when I contacted him this morning. We interviewed John last spring on our “What Works” podcast.
Lucas Frau of NorthJersey.com reports that two Democratic state senators, John Burzichelli and Andrew Zwicker, are hoping to find a solution to save NJ PBS. According to their statement:
The shutdown of public TV in New Jersey will have real-life consequences, depriving the state’s residents of invaluable news and educational programming. The television network has played a pivotal role in New Jersey, bridging the divide between New York and Philadelphia with trusted information relevant to the lives and civic activities of the state’s residents.
Even if WNET is unable to find a partner, it will continue to offer the daily Spotlight newscast on Thirteen, its New York-based television station, which reaches a large segment of New Jersey viewers, and on a variety of digital platforms. Anchor Brianna Vannozzi shared all this with viewers on Tuesday.
In other words, coverage will continue, both on the newscast and on the website. The question is whether NJ Spotlight News will be able to continue offering the same in-depth reporting that has been its hallmark. As is too often the case these days, the answer is probably “no” — unless wealthy benefactors step up.
On the latest “What Works” podcast, Ellen Clegg and I are back from summer break and talk with Bill Marx, the editor-in-chief and founder of the The Arts Fuse. For four decades, he has written about arts and culture for print, broadcast and online outlets, most notably at The Boston Phoenix. He has regularly reviewed theater for public radio station WBUR and The Boston Globe. He is a co-founder of Viva la Book Review, a new organization that aims to foster thoughtful, well-crafted book criticism in community news media across the country.
Bill also created and edited WBUR Online Arts, a cultural webzine that in 2004 won an Online Journalism Award for Specialty Journalism. Until recently, he taught a class on writing arts criticism at Boston University.
I’ve got a Quick Take about the funding crisis in public media and how that relates to the need to fund reliable sources of local news and information. It’s not just a matter of your local public television and radio station needing more support from its audience than ever before. It’s also a matter of the limits of philanthropy. Can we find the money to support hyperlocal nonprofits too? I wrote more about this dilemma recently for CommonWealth Beacon.
Ellen dives into a recent update from Joshua Benton at Nieman Lab on The Republican in Springfield, Massachusetts, and the MassLive website, which has become a web traffic powerhouse as it expands. A previous podcast discussion we had with MassLive’s president, Joshua Macht, and editor Ronnie Ramos can be found here.
You can listen to our conversation here, or you can subscribe through your favorite podcast app.
The nonprofit Cambridge Day is beefing up, hiring veteran journalist Michael Fitzgerald as its editor. Founding editor Marc Levy will remain on board as well.
For many years the Day operated as pretty much a one-person shop, but now it’s got a board of directors and regular contributors. It also offers a weekly print edition and offers some coverage of Somerville as well as Cambridge.
This is yet another example of a community stepping up to fill the gap left by the newspaper chain Gannett’s abandonment of its weekly newspapers in Eastern Massachusetts. Gannett shut down the venerable Cambridge Chronicle in 2022, ending its print edition and replacing local news on its Wicked Local website with irrelevant filler from around the region.
The full announcement of Fitzgerald’s hiring follows.
Continue reading “The nonprofit Cambridge Day names a veteran journalist as its new editor”
